said to Cherry. “Her mother ain’t here to sign her off to you, but if anyone came around poking, they ain’t gonna know that. Looks close enough to her signature, don’t it? Just says in the case of her absence you’re the guardian. You decide what the what is. You know.”
“Mmhmm,” Cherry said. I heard the scratch of pen on paper.
Officer Geary was a sort of half-retired sheriff who occasionally tried to keep Peaches matters under control so the Fresno police didn’t have to come out. He was a good GOTS believer and said his main job was policing for sin. I had never been on the wrong side of it so I’d never cared, but had seen him thwack the legs of the shoplifting infidel boys behind the Pac with a long rod. Heard him call a waitress my mother used to work with a bitch when she gave him his bill and hadn’t comped it. I’d seen the stares he’d given my mother any chance he’d gotten, the way he liked to pull her in for a long long hug each and every time he saw her as if they were lost lovers reunited after shipwreck.
“I don’t like the way it makes the church look,” he said. “Some strange man just showing up for her, clearly not even from here. It’s all people can talk about. Just how’d she get herself in a mess like that?”
“We was without Vern for a long time. And now who’s paying the price? Cherry is.”
“Well, Cherry, we need Lacey here to stay in line. To listen to the brethren.”
I stepped up onto the sagging porch. “Sir, I’ll inform you my mother is coming back.”
“Hush up, child,” Cherry said.
Child. I hated that word. Nothing could feel further from the truth. “I’m no child,” I said under my breath.
“Speak up now,” Cherry said. “If you’re going to be a smart aleck, give it to us loud and clear.”
My heart fluttered. I felt my legs brace. “I’m a woman,” I said. It rang out high and false, my voice not my own.
“A woman?” Geary said. “Well, I should hope so.”
“Blood and all,” Cherry said, half smiling.
“We’ll see just how useful you’ll prove to be,” Geary said. He stood and got close to me. If he tried to hug me like he’d done my mother I’d sock him in the gut. He took Cherry’s hand and gave it a kiss. She blushed. “Good day, ladies.”
After he drove off Cherry lit a vanilla Sweet Dream. Clutched the bull penis cane.
“Don’t you care where she is?” I said to Cherry. “She’s your daughter. We should make a missing person’s report.” I knew that this was standard protocol from watching America’s Most Wanted as a young child, one of my favorite shows before I was saved.
She put the Sweet Dream between her teeth and held her hand to the sky, clenched her eyes for a vision. “She’s still breathing out there. I wouldn’t get my knickers in a twist yet.”
I HADN’T BEEN out in public since my mother had left, but now my loneliness pulled me to the Wine Baron. As I got closer, I saw it was dark inside, the shelves empty. Bob was nowhere. Even the little TV in the corner was gone. A piece of paper was taped to the door: Runned out of here in the name of GOD! It was signed Gifts of the Spirit and the handwriting was clumsy and rushed. The note was a tag, some kind of claim, perhaps an assignment complete, I thought. Maybe they had tried to convert him and he refused. But where had Bob gone? It frightened me that he could be here one day and then every trace of him wiped clear.
Gone the liquor and the naughties. Gone my mother, too. I walked back toward the main strip and sat on a bench in front of the Ag One hardware store, which was still open, a few old farmer men milling about inside. On the bench sweat poured under my dress. I kept my nose in my Bible but inside the Bible was a romance. I didn’t want to talk to anyone exactly but I wanted them to talk to me. I thought perhaps my mother had been in town all along, moving from store to store in a trance, looking for me and all the while I’d been sequestered away at Cherry’s. I wanted a strange angel to come sit next to me and put her arms around me. I wanted God then in physical form. I wanted His body with me and over me and around me. Instead I looked up and there was Lyle.
“Caught you,” he said, snatching the romance from the thin tissue pages of the Bible. He held it up away from me, opened it, and read. “Dolores reached around and pulled Simeon to her by the throat. She kissed him long and hard until the rock of him strained his jeans.” He threw it on the bench next to me like it was stupid but I saw his cheeks flush.
“They were my mother’s,” I said. “I was just reading them to see if I could find any clues.”
“The main clue here is that your mother had a natural disposition toward sin.”
I thought of Lyle’s mother, Pearl, how she sipped wine from a mug all day and was probably just as bad as my mother, but managed to hide it better.
“Thanks for the bathing suit,” I said.
Lyle smiled and looked at his feet. I wondered if he’d had a crush on my mother. It didn’t seem strange to me if he did. I assumed most men had a baseline crush on her, something that was just a fact because of how she looked, something that wasn’t really a choice for them.
“Well, see ya around,” I said.
“See ya at church,” he corrected.
“Vern say it was time for me to come back?” I asked.
He nodded. “God is good, all the time.”
I RAN BACK to Cherry’s. I couldn’t wait to tell her I’d been summoned, but I stopped short in the doorway. There she was, tummy down on the floor of the living room, surrounded by the stuffed rodents I’d seen in the craft room closet. She was making them talk to one another, chirping and clicking like a young child playing dollies. They were in various states of fine dress, corduroy pinafores around little mouse bodies, tiny hats and bibs on baby rats, and leather slippers on an old man possum. Their tails were stiff and curled, their chins raised in thought. One wore glasses. I got a sarsaparilla from the fridge and watched as Cherry got off the floor and entered into some sort of exercise regimen. She sat on her stool spread-legged, toes planted, two of the mice in her hands like tiny barbells. She pivoted half circles, strengthening calves, did biceps curls with the mice, rewarding them with a pecking kiss each time she lifted. Out came the petroleum jelly, and she glossed her forearms with it, between her fingers, landscaping cuticles. Then she did her neck. Pulled on the skin and said gobble gobble softly to herself.
“Gotta keep the body tight for any sort of spiritual rapture,” she said, winded, when she finally noticed me staring. “These guys keep me company.”
I knelt down and touched one of the hard-bodied animals. “They’re so real.”
She clicked the remote. “My babies’ commercial comes on every five minutes, just have you a wait.”
Sure enough, an older magician-looking man in a suit of green velveteen appeared on the small TV screen showing off the stiff animals on his palm, a squirrel duct-taped to his shoulder. “Don’t ever be alone,” he said. “Adopt a companion today!” He held out an empty palm and suddenly a tuft of fur with a face appeared in it, a twinkle in its eye. Cherry ogled the screen like a gambler.
I
